Despite repeated assurances that American nuclear plants are better equipped to deal with natural disasters than their counterparts in Japan, regulators said Thursday that recent inspections had found serious problems with some emergency equipment that would have made it unusable in an accident.
...
The briefing was part of a review requested by the commissioners to evaluate the vulnerability of American reactors to severe natural disasters like the ones that hit the Japanese plant in March.

Marty Virgilio, the deputy executive director of the agency, told the five commissioners that inspectors checked a sample of equipment at all 104 reactors and found problems at less than a third of them. The problems included pumps that would not start or, if they did, did not put out the required amount of water; equipment that was supposed to be set aside for emergencies but was being used in other parts of the plants; emergency equipment that would be needed in case of flood stored in places that could be flooded; and insufficient diesel on hand to run backup systems.
...
The two-hour briefing given to the five-member commission was an early assessment, 30 days into a 90-day review being conducted by an N.R.C. task force.
...
[Massachusetts' Democratic Congressman Ed] Markey pointed out that in the last eight years, the commission had received 69 reports of inoperable diesel generators at 33 plants, with six of those generators out for more than a month. The diesels provide power for water pumps that allow removal of “decay heat,” the heat that fuel generates even after a reactor shuts down. The Fukushima plants shut down successfully but decay heat wrecked their cores.

i think every nuclear plant should have a windmill there for back up power..the windmills in japan with stood all that storm and kept working...and when there is no problem,it would just be generating a lil more electricity..so win win

Fukushima Daiichi had the same problem as the BP Spill had in that the Corporations that made the problem were in charge of information to the public.
I worked on solutions for both in the case of Japan flying robotic Radiation sensors to map the air currents and inside the buildings in charting the spread of Radiation. In the Japan event they mixed sea water to cool the pile and created a new fision event CL-38 as the salt mixed with the neutrons and gave off neturon beams as the radiation spread. The plant is 200 yards from the ocean, and thus the cooling water just leached into the ocean and created a need and still does for tracking radiation in the subsea waters and the bilogical migration of sea animals, like Tuna.
In the BP spill the company had evidence of mass amounts of oil in the water collulm but said noting to the public and stopped the USCG from deployment of special SONAR to map it.

What is wrong with this picture? It is the permission of industry to police itself by government against its own interests as a coporation. They are not to blame for this as much as government of the people is for allowing them to do it.

Where we all are acted on by the influence of corporations in a harmfull way, then our government needs to be the watchdog with full power to take control of dangerous situations with out a role for the suppliers of corporate services in energy.

Lets protect our own interests and health at the expense of the corporations who make the bad decesions in the first place.